A family of six, including two children, has been killed in the besieged Gaza Strip, raising the total death toll from Israel’s 17-day onslaught to 715. The six died after Israeli forces pounded an area near Khan Yunis in southern Gaza on Wednesday. The kids were among several others killed by the Israeli regime’s offensive earlier in the day. According to the United Nations, one Palestinian child has been killed every one hour over the past two days in Gaza. "One child has been killed in Gaza every hour for the past two days," said

a statement released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) earlier in the day.

Earlier in the day, protesters took to streets elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian territories to condemn the Tel Aviv regime’s atrocities.

Clashes broke out between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces in many villages, including Ras al-Amud and Silwan.

Meanwhile, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said armed resistance by Palestinians was “the only way” to confront the Zionist regime of Israel.

“We believe that the West Bank should also be armed like Gaza and those who are interested in Palestine’s destiny should act in this regard,” Ayatollah Khamenei stated.

After intense Israeli strikes on the Khazaa and al-Fakhari neighborhoods overnight and early Wednesday, medics told Ma'an they spent the day pulling bodies from the rubble and searching for injured.

However, they said their work was impeded as Israeli forces prevented them from entering the area several times. Ambulances have still not reached some of those injured or killed by strikes on Khuzaa, the medics said.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human rights estimated on Wednesday that 81.5 percent of those killed in the Israeli offensive were civilians.

The Israeli military said in a statement that more than 60 access shafts leading to some 28 tunnels apparently belonging to Palestinian militants had been found on Wednesday.

The army said it struck over 100 sites across the Strip, "including concealed rocket launchers, terror tunnels, militant compounds, and terror activity posts located within the premises of Al-Wafa hospital, from which multiple attacks were executed against IDF forces."

Three soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants on Wednesday, bringing the total number of soldiers dead in the offensive to 31, the army said in a separate statement.

UN probe

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council launched a probe into the offensive, backing calls by the Palestinians to hold Israel to account despite fierce opposition from Israel.

The decision came after a marathon seven-hour emergency session of the top UN human rights body, where Israelis and Palestinians traded accusations over war crimes.

"What Israel is doing is a crime against humanity," said Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki.

UN human rights chief Navi Pillay also said Israel's military actions could amount to war crimes, while at the same time condemning indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hamas.

"There seems to be a strong possibility that international law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes," Pillay told the council, citing attacks that have killed Palestinian civilians, including children.

She said Israelis also had a right to live without constant fear of rocket attacks.

In the evening on Wednesday, Khaled Mashaal, head of Hamas' political bureau, said in a televised speech that Palestinian militant groups in Gaza refused to disarm.

"No can disarm the resistance," Mashaal said, speaking from Doha.

Twenty-eight foreign ministers of EU member states had on Tuesday called on Hamas' al-Qassam Brigades and other militant groups to disarm.

"We cannot accept any proposal that does not include the lifting of the siege on Gazans," Meshaal said.

"How many Israeli soldiers is Israel willing to see dead before the siege is lifted?"

The leader bemoaned the severe number of Palestinian casualties and the breakdown of the humanitarian situation in Gaza since the start of the offensive.

"Everything in Gaza is collapsing," Mashaal said. "No water, no electricity, no medicine, no fuel, no food."

He urged UN chief Ban Ki-Moon to visit Gaza to witness the effects of the onslaught firsthand.

Israel says it launched "Operation Protective Edge" in response to increased rocket fire on southern Israel in June and early July.

Militant groups in Gaza say they launched the rockets in response to Israel's military search campaign to find three missing Israeli teenagers, a campaign that left at least six Palestinians dead, dozens injured, and hundreds arrested.

Nearly 700 killed so far UNRWA has strongly condemned the recent Israeli shelling of one of its schools serving as a shelter for hundreds of displaced Palestinians, in central Gaza. The UN Human Rights Council has launched a probe into Israel's actions in the region. "At approximately 16:55 hours Tuesday, UNRWA’s Maghazi Preparatory Girls School, in the Maghazi refugee camp where approximately 300 internally displaced people had sought refuge was struck by explosive ordnance believed to have been fired by Israeli forces. One person, a child, was injured in the shelling incident. We have raised this shelling incident with the Israeli authorities," said UNRWA in a press release published by WAFA Palestinian News & Info Agency.

"This morning, when UNRWA officials went back to investigate the incident, there was further shelling of the school, seriously endangering the lives of UN humanitarian workers and displaced civilians. This second incident took place at approximately 10:29 hours this morning and was 30 minutes inside the 09:00 to 11:00 hours window of time that had been coordinated with Israeli authorities and the UN to allow freedom of movement for the relevant UN personnel through the Maghzi Camp Area."

Pierre Krähenbühl, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, is reported to have said: "This is a serious violation of United Nations’ premises that could have had far-reaching human consequences. All UNRWA facilities are clearly marked with a UN flag. The location of the school and the fact that it was housing internally displaced persons had been formally communicated to Israel on three separate occasions. We have called on the Israeli authorities to carry out an immediate and comprehensive investigation."

Furthermore, director of UNRWA Operations Robert Turner said: "Our teams are already working flat out to meet the huge demand created by this escalation in violence, and it is absolutely critical that all parties to the conflict respect the neutrality and inviolability of our premises. Operating in this challenging environment is difficult enough; we need to be assured that staff and beneficiaries can enjoy safety and security within our premises. Civilian lives must not be put at further risk."

According to WAFA's report, UNRWA schools are now essentially serving as IDP camps, addressing the needs of some 118,000 internally displaced people who have taken refuge in 77 of the Agency’s schools throughout the Gaza Strip.

This number has increased from 50,000 only two days ago, WAFA stated.

As of January 2014, there were approximately 5.4 million Palestinian people registered as refugees in various parts of the world, by UNRWA's count. Palestinians now make up the largest refugee group in the entire world, and the numbers are increasing daily, in alarming increments.

The UN Human Rights Council has launched a probe into the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, supporting Palestinian efforts to hold Israel up to international scrutiny, according to Ma'an News Agency.

The council of 46 backed a Palestinian-drafted resolution by 29 votes. Arab and fellow Muslim countries, joined by Latin American and African nations, along with Russia and China which, incidentally, also has a large Muslim population, were among supporting nations.

The United States again played out its typical role of voting against UN resolutions which hold Israel accountable for it gross violations of international human rights and laws, while European countries abstained in the voting.

Thirty-one Israelis, all but two of them soldiers, have also died in the fighting, according to Ma'an, in addition to a foreign civilian worker who died Wednesday after being hit by mortar fire, while serving food to soldiers in southern Israel.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian supporters have gathered, in recent days, to take part in mass demonstrations, across the globe, against the Israeli military's ongoing and merciless assault on the Gaza Strip.

Rawia Abu Joma’a, 17, has not been informed that two Israeli rocket attacks had killed her four-year-old sister, Rahaf, as well as three cousins. Lying at the Shifa Hospital on July 22,2014, Rawia was wounded when two Israeli air strikes attacked her family's apartment on Sunday night.

Fadi Abu Al Foul recalled how the Israeli airstrike that
smashed into the street outside his family’s house flung his
two-year-old daughter, Ne’ma, into the air like a rag doll.“It sent her as high as the second floor of the apartment,” he said.It
was the fall back to the ground that left her with a smashed nose,

cracked forehead and badly swollen black eyes that she has not been able to open since the incident on Sunday. She was admitted to Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital.

Still, while watching their daughter squirm in pain in her hospital bed, Mr Abu Al Foul, 32, and his wife Dunia, 21, know that the result could have been worse.

Ne’ma was fortunate to be alive.

“Thank God, the doctors say she’ll be back normal. We still have her with us,” he said.

Many other child victims of Israel’s bombardment of the Palestinian territory have not been so lucky, and health officials and rights groups say this may be because, unlike Ne’ma, they were indoors when the bombardments rained down.

The number of children killed in Gaza since fighting between Hamas militants and Israel erupted on July 8 reached 154 on Tuesday, with another 1,250 wounded, said Ashraf Al Qedra, spokesman for Gaza’s health ministry.

With just over 600 Palestinians killed so far, the death rate among children in Israel’s latest assault on Gaza is roughly the same as during the devastating three-week offensive that began in December 2008, when there were 354 child casualties out of a total 1,400 Palestinian deaths.

Mr Al Qedra said the high child death rate was because the Israeli air strikes and shelling have levelled entire homes. Human rights groups and Gaza medical officials say the attacks have deliberately targeted civilians, while the Arab League has accused Israel of committing war crimes.

Some speculators think the rate those children killed and wounded in attacks during the current fighting will likely far exceed that witnessed during the eight-day war in 2012 between Israel and Hamas that killed 34 children among a total of 180 war dead.

“Israel is using extreme force by using powerful weapons that literally collapse four-storey homes and tear apart bodies,” said Mohammed Abu Rukba, a Gaza field researcher for the Geneva-based Defence For Children International.

Still, the fighting appears to be far from over, and he and other researchers in the territory say casualty figures are changing daily.

But doctors say the wounds children have suffered have been severe, with head injuries, severed limbs and crushed bodies, a common result of entire houses crashing down on top of them.

Nabil Al Haddad, a paediatric surgeon at Al Shifa Hospital, said many children died soon after being admitted because of the severity of their wounds. Some of these were caused by a special kind of shrapnel that he described as “a thousand tiny needles” penetrating their bodies, which often cause a painful but not immediate death.

“You see these kids and you try to operate on them, but in a lot of cases, if they make beyond the surgery, they just die later,” he said.

He said the needlelike shrapnel was “something I haven’t seen” in previous wars, including the 2008-2009 and 2012 conflicts, as well as in the two intifada, or uprisings, over the past 25 years.

A report by Britain’s Guardian newspaper on Sunday described Israel’s acknowledged use of what are known as “fléchette shells”, which scatter thousands of metal darts about four centimetres in length.

Although not prohibited under international law, the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem told the paper, the use of the shells in Gaza was “illegal” because they were imprecise weapons that did not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

The Gaza death toll may be even higher than reported because fighting between Hamas and Israel problem has prevented the retrieval of bodies from some areas. One of those is Shujaieh, in eastern Gaza, which was practically levelled by Israeli strikes on Sunday. The shelling, along with Hamas reprisal attacks, forced thousands to flee and leave behind belongings and dead loved ones.

The bodies of eight-year-old Besan Dhaher’s family, including her mother, father and a younger brother, are still somewhere under the rubble of their family home in Shujaieh.

But lying half-conscious in her bed at Al Shifa Hospital, her face burnt and badly bruised, Besan had no idea. The family fear that telling her the news now.

“She’s suffered so much,” said Heba Dhaher, 30, a cousin who was acting as Besan’s guardian.

Ms Dhaher especially fears telling Besan the fate of her 11-year-old sister, Narmen, who also perished. “They were so close that you couldn’t find them away from each other,” she said.

The current round of fighting is poised to elevate the enclave’s already acute issues of psychological trauma, brought on by seemingly unending war with Israel.

“According to an assessment by aid workers on ground at least 107,000 children need psycho-social support for the trauma they are experiencing such as death, injury or loss of their homes,” said Jens Laerke, spokesman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Rawia Abu Joma’a, 17, also has not been informed that two Israeli rocket attacks had killed her four-year-old sister, Rahaf, as well as three cousins: Assem Ammar, four, his sister Eman, eight, and their brother Ibrahim, 12.

“Their bodies were completely cut up. It’s just too hard to tell her,” said Rawia’s aunt, Randa Abu Joma’a, describing the attack on the family home.

Rawia barely survived the attack, which broke her right hip, perforated her face and right leg with shrapnel and burnt the flesh off her right forearm.

Mrs Abu Joma’a cried at Rawia’s bedside.

So did Ne’ma’s parents. But they were also hopeful that she would soon have a new sister to play.

“My wife is pregnant,” said Mr Abu Al Foul, smiling.

You find the photo's/video's disturbing? Remember, this is what Palestinian children see almost every day